When the photographs depicting torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released in 2004, U.S. politicians attributed the incident to a few bad apples in the American military, exonerated high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, promoted Guantánamo as a model prison, and dismissed the illegality of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation." By the end of the Bush administration, members of both major congressional parties had come to denounce enhanced interrogation as torture and argue for the closing of Guantánamo. What initiated this shift? In Talking About Torture, Jared Del Rosso reviews transcripts from congressional hearings and scholarship on denial, torture, and state violence to document this wholesale change in rhetoric and attitude toward the use of torture by the CIA and the U.S. military during the War on Terror. He plots the evolution of the "torture issue" in U.S. politics and its manipulation by politicians to serve various ends. Most important, Talking About Torture integrates into the debate about torture the testimony of those who suffered under American interrogation practices and demonstrates how the conversation continues to influence current counterterrorism policies, such as the reliance on drones.
Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O’Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does. In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely this justification. But does torture accomplish what its defenders say it does? For ethical reasons, there are no scientific studies of torture. But neuroscientists know a lot about how the brain reacts to fear, extreme temperatures, starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and immersion in freezing water, all tools of the torturer’s trade. These stressors create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive. As O’Mara guides us through the neuroscience of suffering, he reveals the brain to be much more complex than the brute calculations of torturers have allowed, and he points the way to a humane approach to interrogation, founded in the science of brain and behavior. Torture may be effective in forcing confessions, as in Stalin’s Russia. But if we want information that we can depend on to save lives, O’Mara writes, our model should be Napoleon: “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”
Experts in the intelligence community say that torture is ineffective. Yet much of the public appears unconvinced: surveys show that nearly half of Americans think that torture can be acceptable for counterterrorism purposes. Why do people persist in supporting torture—and can they be persuaded to change their minds? In Tortured Logic, Erin M. Kearns and Joseph K. Young draw upon a novel series of group experiments to understand how and why the average citizen might come to support the use of torture techniques. They find evidence that when torture is depicted as effective in the media, people are more likely to approve of it. Their analysis weighs variables such as the ethnicity of the interrogator and the suspect; the salience of one’s own mortality; and framing by experts. Kearns and Young also examine who changes their opinions about torture and how, demonstrating that only some individuals have fixed views while others have more malleable beliefs. They argue that efforts to reduce support for torture should focus on convincing those with fluid views that torture is ineffective. The book features interviews with experienced interrogators and professionals working in the field to contextualize its findings. Bringing empirical rigor to a fraught topic, Tortured Logic has important implications for understanding public perceptions of counterterrorism strategy.
Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
An explosive memoir about the creation and implementation of the controversial Enhanced Interrogation Techniques by the former Chief Operations Officer for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center.
Jennifer Harbury's investigation into torture began when her husband disappeared in Guatemala in 1992; she told the story of his torture and murder in Searching for Everardo. For over a decade since, Harbury has used her formidable legal, research, and organizing skills to press for the U.S. government's disclosure of America's involvement in harrowing abuses in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. A draft of this book had just been completed when the first photos from Abu Ghraib were published; tragically, many of Harbury's deepest fears about America's own abuses were graphically confirmed by those horrific images. This urgently needed book offers both well-documented evidence of the CIA's continuous involvement in torture tactics since the 1970s and moving personal testimony from many of the victims. Most important, Harbury provides solid, convincing arguments against the use of torture in any circumstances: not only because it is completely inconsistent with all the basic values Americans hold dear, but also because it has repeatedly proved to be ineffective: Again and again,'information' obtained through these gruesome tactics proves unreliable or false. Worse, the use of torture by U.S. client states, allies, and even by our own operatives, endangers our citizens and especially our troops deployed internationally.
This collection explores torture from the array of approaches offered by the arts and humanities. It contends that these disciplines advance the discussion and eradication of torture by speaking about it in terms cognizant of the assaults on truth, memory, subjectivity, and language that the humanities theorize and that experience of torture perpetuates.
“If law be the bedrock of civil society, it can no more undergird torture than it could support slavery or genocide.” –from the Introduction The graphic photographs of U.S. military personnel grinning over abused Arab and Muslim prisoners shocked the world community. That the United States was systematically torturing inmates at prisons run by its military and civilian leaders divided the nation and brought deep shame to many. When Steven H. Miles, an expert in medical ethics and an advocate for human rights, learned of the neglect, mistreatment, and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere, one of his first thoughts was: “Where were the prison doctors while the abuses were taking place?” In Oath Betrayed, Miles explains the answer to this question. Not only were doctors, nurses, and medics silent while prisoners were abused; physicians and psychologists provided information that helped determine how much and what kind of mistreatment could be delivered to detainees during interrogation. Additionally, these harsh examinations were monitored by health professionals operating under the purview of the U.S. military. Miles has based this book on meticulous research and a wealth of resources, including unprecedented eyewitness accounts from actual victims of prison abuse, and more than thirty-five thousand pages of documentation acquired through provisions of the Freedom of Information Act: army criminal investigations, FBI notes on debriefings of prisoners, autopsy reports, and prisoners’ medical records. These documents tell a story markedly different from the official version of the truth, revealing involvement at every level of government, from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon’s senior health officials to prison health-care personnel. Oath Betrayed is not a denunciation of American military policy or of war in general, but of a profound betrayal of traditions that have shaped the medical corps of the United States armed forces and of America’s abdication of its leadership role in international human rights. This book is a vital document that will both open minds and reinvigorate Americans’ understanding of why human rights matter, so that we can reaffirm and fortify the rules for international civil society. “This, quite simply, is the most devastating and detailed investigation into a question that has remained a no-no in the current debate on American torture in George Bush’s war on terror: the role of military physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel. Dr. Miles writes in a white rage, with great justification–but he lets the facts tell the story.” –Seymour M. Hersh, author of Chain of Command “Steven Miles has written exactly the book we require on medical complicity in torture. His admirable combination of scholarship and moral passion does great service to the medical profession and to our country.” –Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, and co-editor of Crimes of War: Iraq From the Hardcover edition.
Torture is indisputably abhorrent. Why, you might ask, would you even want to think or read about torture? That is a very good question, and one this book addresses in a compelling and enlightening way. Torture is a very important issue, not least because millions of people around the world have been subjected to this odious practice—and many are enduring torture right now as you read these words.
